The Lord of Opium

Oliver Sacks, a great doctor, has written a book called Musicophilia. It is about the deep way music affects people and how it can reach those who have had strokes, amnesia, and Alzheimer’s disease. If you go on YouTube and enter “Alive Inside” or “Old Man in Nursing Home Reacts to Hearing Music,” you will see an amazing demonstration of this. Henry Dryer, age ninety-two, suffers from dementia and is in a near-complete stupor. The nurse puts earphones on his head and plays the music of Cab Calloway, the old man’s favorite. Immediately, his eyes light up. He sways to the beat, sings, and remembers who he is. The effect wears off, but for a while after the music has stopped playing, Henry Dryer is awake. It is a deeply moving scene and one that I found almost too heartrending to watch. I used it in the book for Eusebio and Mirasol.

THE MUSHROOM MASTER

There really is a Mushroom Master. His name is Paul Stamets, and he runs a company called Fungi Perfecti in Washington State. His specialties are mycoremediation and mycofiltration, ten-dollar words for “cleaning up the soil using mushrooms.” He wrote a book called Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. It’s very good, but very demanding, and you need to know a lot of science to understand it. But you can go to YouTube and look up “Paul Stamets” and “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World” for an eighteen-minute description with pictures.

You can also Google “Paul Stamets,” “Going Underground,” and “the Sun” for an interview that gives a simple, but fascinating description of his work. If you’re really interested, you can go on his company’s website, fungi.com, order a chunk of wood full of spores, and grow your own mushrooms.

JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO

In my opinion, José Clemente Orozco was the greatest artist Mexico ever produced. He grew up during the Mexican civil war of the early part of the twentieth century. What he saw gave him a lifelong aversion to politics. As a young man he contracted rheumatic fever, which gave him a permanent heart condition. On one of his early jobs he mixed chemicals to make fireworks to sell on Mexican Independence Day. The chemicals exploded. He lost one hand, part of his hearing, and the sight in one eye. Now picture this: We have a young man missing a hand, an eye, part of his hearing, and with a heart so weak he has to rest every few minutes. He wants to paint huge murals on the sides of walls. And he does! And they’re good! Whenever I feel like whining about my problems, I think about Orozco. I have made him one of Chacho’s ancestors.

THE GHOST ARMY

Long ago my mother-in-law told me this story. If you fly over the sand dunes near Swakopmund, Namibia (which is in southern Africa), on a full moon night, you can see a vast field of skeletons. They are only visible on full moon nights. She thought they were horses used by German troops during World War I. The curious thing is that each horse (or mule—they were there too) has a bullet hole in its skull.

The truth is this: The animals belonged to South African troops battling the Germans. There was an outbreak of glanders, a fatal, highly infectious disease, and the ship carrying the vaccine was wrecked before it could reach the army. To keep the other horses from being infected, the soldiers killed 1,695 horses and 944 mules. It must have been a traumatic thing to do, because the men were fond of their animals. But they had to do it to save the rest. This happened in 1915, and today, almost a hundred years later, the skeletons are still there. I found this image haunting and used it at the close of The Lord of Opium.

PARADISE

The setting for The Lord of Opium exists. It is the two towns of Portal and Paradise in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. Portal contains the Sky Village, consisting of small, private observatories. It also consists of a small town with a library, café, and post office. I live in Portal. Higher in the mountain is Paradise, and between them is the American Museum of Natural History Southwestern Research Station. This is where I put El Patrón’s mansion and hospital. Near it is the oasis, although I placed it south of Ajo in The House of the Scorpion.

This area is a Sky Island, a unique setting where many different species of plants and animals can survive. Half the animal species of North America live in our Sky Island. We are also on a major drug smuggling route for the Sinaloa Cartel.